The Future of Work in the Next Industrial Revolution: 2 Frameworks

While Klaus Schwab marks our moment today as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Jeremy Rifkin marks it as the Third Industrial Revolution. They each describe our history and future based on different tipping points. A comparison of these perspectives brings priorities for the future of work into focus.

Common ideas across both frameworks

Key Priorities

Regardless of how we frame our history, Schwab and Rifkin agree that we must prepare for the future in a sustainable and proactive way. We foreground what needs to happen systemically for organizations:

Build new business models, ways of working, and organizational structures from a “technology backbone”

Integrate IoT into the enterprise and design for its impact. This effort is part of a large-scale “internetization of industry” where dynamic networks will define our infrastructures and affect how we interact

Apply a systems leadership where every augmented worker will be empowered and responsible in equal measure

Working towards

A POST-CARBON,HUMAN-CENTERED,CREATIVE FUTURE:

In light of our comparison between the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions, we face an unprecedented opportunity to transform the ways we think and work together.

Change of mindsets

Think systems, not technologies; empowering, not determining; by design, not by default.

Adopt a zoom-in, zoom-out strategy (zoom in to understand specific disruptive technologies, zoom out to see the impact from larger combinatorial patterns).

Calls to action

Be human-led and human-centered in our strategies and designs.

Build a smart connected infrastructure throughout the digital ecosystem.